Sept. 2 — Astronomers reported Tuesday that a kilometer-wide asteroid could hit Earth in 2014 — but don’t panic just yet: The chances of a catastrophic collision are currently about 1 in a million, and the risk is likely to drop to zero as more observations are made.


Source: www.msn.com


Will this asteroid really hit Earth?!?! Oh man! Now I'm really worried right now.

I hope this asteroid misses, I don't wanna die to some asteroid!

p.s. sorry if I'm sounding like a coward but, this is unbelievable!

If it's the one I read about then it's a 'small' one. A few yards across. Should only get about 40-60% of life forms, and mostly if you live near a coast. Nothing to worry about.

http://smilies.sofrayt.com/%5E/a0/biggrintongue.gif

Good thing I live in Minnesota then (Moving to Michigan later)!

Relax, death rules, it's like eternal rest, and heck, if I want to do something, it's resting :D

oh come on it's 11 years... we'll just have to party a bit harder until the end...

[img]smile.gif[/img]

What is the problem? Return of the King will be out on DVD by then also all of the Star Wars series. So what is the problem? Do you want to live forever? Also Michigan is a bad idea. It will bring you closer the the great lakes and if the astroid hits an ocean it will raise the water levels which will cause the great lakes to flood also. The big problem is if it hits land. Nuclear winter as on Narn could be a bad thing. But we will just have to wait and sea.

Granamere

That's very true, but waking up the next morning is also high on my priority list. :D

rather than worrying about a known asteroid that only has a one in a million chance to hit us in eleven years, you should worry about some two thousand 'global killers' (kilometer and more in diameter) out there that we know absolutely nothing about (only about two hundred such bodies have so far been identified and their orbits analyzed). as many asteroid hunters would warn, there's currently a good chance that we would only notice an impacting body as it was rushing through our atmosphere, gradually becoming brighter and brighter, dwarfing even the sun moments before it wiped out most life on the planet. those that died immediately upon impact would probably be considered lucky...

[ 09-02-2003, 04:57 PM: Message edited by: frudi_x ]

The thing is, the predicted orbit of anything we havent been observing for months is not a line, its a cone, with the extremeties of the cone describing orbits given by the data we have with the maximum amount of error applied. Earth is in the cone for this asteroid, therefore it is possible given the data we have that it could strike us.

As we observe it for longer, we can get more accurate information, the cone gets narrower, and in all probability the rock wont end up coming closer than a few million kilometers.

Did you know that an all-absorbing black hole is normally no bigger than a tennis-ball and that it probably warps everything to another part of the galaxy?

hmm, I read something that these astoroids things happen alot actually. Its just not told to the outside world. Also, alot of them missed earth.
Heh, and for those that survive and are happy about it, just lemme tell you most astoroids carry new life-forms, usually very small ones, like virus-size ;) :D

well, black holes are somewhat off-topic here, but no matter [img]smile.gif[/img]
actually, unless i've missed some big discovery lately, mini-black holes are only being theorised on for now, as there is no real mechanisem known to explain their creation. the black holes that more or less certainly exist are the remains of massive stars that end their lives in a supernova explosion. when nuclear reactions in the star's core stop, the core collapses under it's own gravitational pull until not even light can escape it's immense gravity. the 'point of no return', beyond which escape velocity exceeds the speed of light, is the event horizon and that is what is usually referred to as the size of the black hole. so the 'radius' of a black hole the mass of a few sun's masses is actually a few kilometers.
there are probably also black holes in the centers of most galaxies, those have masses on the order of millions of times the mass of our sun and are about the size of our solar system.

p.s., just to comment on what Mirac wrote...
indeed, there really are quite a lot of bodies a few meters in size hiting our planet, but these bodies are weak enough to break up very high up in the atmosphere, so the explosions they cause aren't a threat to us. and i'm not talking firecracker-type explosions here, rather think 'little boy' or 'fat man' size explosions! all thanks to our precious atmosphere that guards us from yet another cosmic danger [img]smile.gif[/img] .
as for the near misses - iirc there was an asteroid some 300 meters across that a few years ago missed the earth by only about 50.000 or 100.000 kilometers! that is incredibly close (the moon is on average 386.000 kilemeters away) and an asteroid this size could easily devastate an entire continent.

[ 09-02-2003, 05:51 PM: Message edited by: frudi_x ]

sorry for bringing this kind of topic here, its just that I was so shocked by this discovery.

First the war on terrorisom, and now this.

The world is a cruel place :( .

In 1999 a huge (2.5 kilometers across) missed the earth due to the unexpected gravity field of the strange position of Saturn at the time. It completely missed our star system, but before that happened astrologists believed it to be a 1 in 650000 chance to hit our planet. Scarry stuff, kids.

An asteroid isn't going to hit the earth, I've heard about so many from the Discovery Channel that such and such is going to smack into the Earth. They don't know if it will or not.

I *really* doubt that that beast is gonna hit us. [img]tongue.gif[/img] And if it does, the last thing I'll be doing, probably is gonna be chatting on MSN with a friend(if it is still around) :D

I'm not worried, we still have Bruce Willis. :D

<font color=cadetblue>Nah, he's getting too old for this kind of action.</font>

don't worry, by that time some powerful nation on Earth would have created a powerful weapon to blow that thing sky high.

Poor lad, did you not watch Armageddon? :rolleyes:

IMHO, Armageddon is one of the shittiest movies ever. Even worse than Deep Impact, and that one sucked big time. I mean, c'mon! Gravity!? The asteroid would have to be at least 200 kilometers across to produce a nonnegligible gravity force. Tearing suits!? Bruce, with fat gloves, tears the guy's suit's AMERICAN FLAG and the suit ruptures! The message was probably something like: American Flag keeps you alive!? Locating the Asteroid!? Very dilligent work. And what their plan is!? And where they choose to hide!? And the god damn oil drillers!? Come on!!
At this point I would like to state out, again, that this is only my humble oppinion. You're oppinion may differ, but that is irrelevant.

Well it's not based on fact Bozos, it is a movie of fiction after all [img]tongue.gif[/img]

Yes, I know it's a movie of fiction. So is Matrix, but that didn't stop him from recieving the "Most Probable Movie Of The Century" by some renown movie organisation. Sorry if I sound hard. A bit worked up. Nothing to worry. Continue.

Poor lad, did you not watch Armageddon? :rolleyes: </font>[/QUOTE]I was thinking about that Mega Cannon in anime Macross. :D

Dude, this asteroid end of the world thing happens often, nothing to worry about. And the chances of the asteroid hitting is slim, this same thing appeared last year. Its to far away to truly figure out, but I seriously doubt it. And, at the rate technology is advancing I'm sure we will have some way of destroying it

And hey if it wipes out all life on earth so much thebetter, it has happened before, fresh start for a new life form... which do you think it will be, Rats or roaches?

The planet hasn't been hit by a "large" asteroid for 2000 years+, the way I figure it the chance of one hitting us in our lifetime is extremely low...Enjoy life, don't tune in to scare mongering news like that, what will be will be. Not much the human race can do about asteroids anyway is there?

yea you guys are right, I really should stop worrying about this and enjoy life, I've talked to my uncle about this and said its fake, I dunno if thats true though.

No it's perfectly true:

"Within two or three days the surface of the Earth will be cold and dark. And it is the dark that is the problem, because the plants will begin to die out.

"At best guess, we will probably lose about 25 per cent of the human population of the planet in the first six months or so.

"The rest of us are basically back to the Middle Ages. We have got no power, no communications, no infrastructure. We are back to hunter-gathering."

Have you got a tin hat?

It's a SILVER HAT that is needed - get your facts right in future Mr Donut!!!! ;)

I love the way that, in Armageddon, when bruise willis sacrifices himself at the end of the film its meant to be moving and emotional. Can you hold back the tears?

Oh, but of course when Paris gets completely destroyed the attitude is something along the lines of, "damn, lucky it didn't hit the US of A or we could have had a tragedy on our hands!!"

Grrr... it made me mad. God bless America my arse.

Yep Armageddon was a piece of shit movie...

You can say that again(refer to last page for further info). And very forced patriotismic.

Actually there are things we can do if it is spotted early enough. The closer the object is the harder it is move off course to miss the planet. Think about it this way. Shoot at a target with a gun from 100 meters. Now move the barrel an inch to the right. Repeat this from 1 meter. You will notice a pretty big difference in where the bullet hits. Same with an astroid. If we know for sure that one is going to hit and it is still months/years away a small 'nudge' with a few hundred megaton of nuc's fill cause it to miss the planet.

The last large impact was in Russia (Tunguska) less then a hundred years ago. The concussion from the blast, estimated at 20 megatons of TNT, leveled trees in an area nearly 40 miles in diameter. This from a rock merely 100 feet in diameter. Just think of the fun that would cause today if one hit a major city.

Also correct me if I am wrong but are not the chances of us decting anything as small as 100 feet in diameter before it hits almost impossible? I know 100 feet is a third of a football field but that is very small when you think of how big space is. Think about it. Trying to protect against something that small over the whole world. How many Hubbles would you need just to do that? Also finding them in time enough to knock them off course?

Granamere

it is possible to detect objects even just a few meters in diameter, but those are purely chance discoveries. and even then they have to pass very near the earth to become bright enough to detect. the problem is, there is just no way to detect all the objects larger than say 10 meters (these can survive the fall through our atmosphere and explode near the surface, causing megaton size explosions), as these objects probably number in the billions or more!
the best we can hope for is to someday be able to track all objects larger than say 100 meters, those have the potential to devastate entire countries. even this task is currently well above the capabilities of the rather limited network of telescopes searching for earth crossing objects at the moment.
what IS currently being worked on is finding and tracking the 'global killers', objects about 1 km in size or larger, those can put us back into the stone age (those few people that actually survive the first year after impact). iirc it will take a couple of decades to achieve this at the current rate of discovery.

the second issue is, of course, what to do if we actually find an object on collision course. blowing it up is not a good option, as that only leaves many smaller fragments that are still going to hit, possibly doing even more damage than the single larger impact! the only real option is deflection and the only feasible way to achieve this with the current technology are nuclear weapons, detonated above the surface of the asteroid. problem is, we have neither warheads powerful enough (or maybe we do, not really sure about the power of the weapon required) nor a delivery system that could reach the target.
so basicly, if anything is intent on hitting us in the next decade or so, there's nothing we can do about it. fortunately, the chances of that happening are rather miniscule.

[ 09-03-2003, 06:18 PM: Message edited by: frudi_x ]

The main problem is this: an object between 50 and 200 feet is only noticable to us when it is between our planet and the sun, it's trajectory is similar to ours and is a bit out of the exact earth-sun line in the direction of it's vector. Meaning, we can see it only in this type of situation:


_O-sun

___o-object of 100 feet --->it's vector

____________/->earth's vector
__0-earth ---
Meaning: Oh, look! It's gonna hit us...! skrshhh!!!!!

The news said today: "they figured out that the asteroid will hit dead center in Greenland". They also said the angle that it hits will turn the whole planet about 22 degrees off its axis. They also said that only one (1) human in every 4,500,000 would survive the inpact and most of them that do survive would live in the land down under. This means that Menmoch would still be here to keep the Ironworks going, so what is everybody so worried about? Don't you realize that we have already beat the odds, so everybody kick back and stop all the worry. :D